A presidential historian who has accurately predicted the outcome of nine of the last 10 elections on Monday again pleaded with Democratic leaders not to abandon President Biden after his disastrous debate performance and blasted media members who relentlessly criticize his declining cognitive abilities.
“They’re completely wrong,” Alan Lichtman, a history professor at American University, said on “CNN News Central” after making a similar assessment on the cable network Friday night.
“You know, all the pundits watched Hillary Clinton win three debates in 2016,” Lichtman added. “They all said Trump was over after ‘Access Hollywood,’ and they were very often wrong.”
The presidential prophet then dismissed concerns about the 81-year-old president’s mental state.
“In terms of Biden’s competency, I’m not a neurologist, they’re not neurologists, so they’re not qualified to comment on that,” Lichtman said, before repeating the argument made by the White House and Democratic Party officials: “I’ll just say that Biden is much better judged on his three years and four months or so of being president, not on his 90 minutes.”
His prediction system has predicted the winner of every presidential election except for one since 1984, based on 13 “keys to the White House”: incumbency, party confidence, competition, third party, long-term economics, short-term economics, policy change, social unrest, scandal, incumbent charisma, challenger charisma, and foreign policy/military success.
“Biden has eliminated the incumbency key and eliminated the party’s contest key,” Lichtman explained on CNN. “If you get rid of him, you lose the incumbency key and you lose the contest key. So instead of going up two keys and dropping six more and predicting a Democratic loss, you go down two keys and dropping four more.”
Lichtman also noted Monday that “never” since the 20th century or before has a major party candidate been re-elected in the case of an “uncertain or contested nomination.”
Lichtman entered the election prediction business in the early 1980s when he and mathematician Vladimir Kaylis-Borok developed an algorithm that could predict election winners based on a key, and correctly predicted that Ronald Reagan would win the 1984 presidential election in a landslide victory over Walter Mondale.
Lichtman’s predictions were thwarted in 2000 when he correctly predicted that then-Vice President Al Gore would win the popular vote, but the election was cast when George W. Bush won the electoral college.
The historian, who has yet to make a definitive 2024 prediction based on his own electoral votes, accused CNN co-hosts John Berman and Sara Sydnor of “conspiring to help Donald Trump lie and get elected president” by dedicating airtime to questions about Biden’s mental state.
First Lady Jill Biden also spoke out against President Trump’s “lieAfter the debate, she tried to deflect attention from her husband’s shaky and dazed performance by saying:
The first family retreated to Camp David on Sunday to reportedly review Biden’s political future. The New York TimesMany also accused aides of over-preparing for the aging patriarch, who will be 86 by the end of his second term in the Oval Office.
His eldest son, Hunter Biden, has reportedly been one of his father’s strongest advocates for continuing the campaign, describing him as “competitive and knows the facts.”
At least 72% CBS News/YouGov Poll Respondents The report, released Sunday, said it believed Biden did not have the “necessary mental and cognitive health to serve as president.”
Among Democrats, 41% agreed with that assessment.
But unless Biden voluntarily steps down, the path to finding someone to replace him as the Democratic nominee will not be easy.
The presidential campaign has already agreed to a second debate with President Trump, scheduled for September.
